Los indios eran hombres capaces de razón y doctrina, casi–humanos o bestias con apariencia humana Esta cuestión se presta a muchas y muy variadas consideraciones. Parece que cuanto más se quiere aclarar esta cuestión mayor es la maraña que se trenza. Hay especialistas que niegan de plano que existiera tal controversia y otros, sin embargo, que defienden que esta polémica constituyó el primer gran debate filosófico y teológico del Nuevo Mundo relacionado con sus pobladores. Traemos a dos autores que protagonizaron (...) hace unos años una intensa y cordial divergencia sobre este punto: Por una parte Lewis Hänke que hace girar la cuestión sobre la naturaleza o esencia de los indígenas: ¿son seres humanos o bestias irracionales? Y en el otro extremo Lino Gómez Canedo que deja a salvo la humanidad de los naturales como algo que no se había negado nunca y centra el debate en si éstos tenían derecho a su libertad individual, al dominio de sus cosas y tierras, si podían ser compelidos a trabajar para los españoles, etc. Tampoco podemos olvidar que una buena porción de esta confusión -aparte de los prejuicios y de la finalidad apologética o detractora que existe en algunos escritores- la compone la falta de claridad y confusión existente entre el significado y distinción de los términos ‘incapacidad’, ‘irracionalidad’, ‘bestialidad’ o ‘animalidad’. (shrink)

El término “ambivalencia” cumple con varias de las funciones teóricas más relevantes tanto para el psicoanálisis como para su tesis fundacional: la del inconsciente. Este artículo se plantea la necesidad de elaborar una revisión somera que sea capaz de enlazar los condicionantes socio-históricos de la disciplina freudiana con los antecedentes teóricos más relevantes de su objeto de estudio. En este nexo surge la historia de la filosofía y sus contribuciones a la constitución de su concepto de inconsciente, comportándose como si (...) se tratara de un “alter ego”, incómodo pero imprescindible, de cuya acechanza Freud nunca se llega a emancipar. (shrink)

In both philosophy and the sciences of the mind there is a shared commitment to the idea that there is a center— the seat of consciousness, the source of deliberation and reflection, and the core of personal identity —in the mind. My dissertation challenges this deeply entrenched view. I review the empirical literature on working memory, psychology’s best candidate for the workspace of the mind, and argue that it is not a natural kind and cannot inform these central cognitive processes. (...) This deflationary view directly imperils many naturalistic theories of consciousness that rely on working memory, which are reviewed in this project. This dissertation thus serves as the necessary first negative step required to begin the process of articulating socially-embedded accounts of many central cognitive processes that dominate the contemporary philosophical literature, including consciousness and reasoning. (shrink)

We posit a key goal of firms’ corporate social responsibility efforts is to influence reputation through carefully crafted communicative practices. This trend has accelerated with the rise of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, which are essentially public message networks that organizations are leveraging to engage with concerned audiences. Given the large number of messages sent on these sites, only some will be effective and achieve broad public resonance. Building on signaling theory, this paper asks whether and how messages (...) conveying CSR-related topics resonate with the public and, if so, which CSR topics and signal qualities are most effective. We test our hypotheses using data on public reactions to Fortune 500 companies’ CSR-focused Twitter feeds, using the retweeting of firms’ messages as a proxy for public resonance. We find resonance is positively associated with messages that convey CSR topics such as the environment or education, those that make the topic explicit through use of hashtags, and those that tap into existing social movement discussions. (shrink)

Data do not speak for themselves. Data must be narrated—put to work in particular contexts, sunk into narratives that give them shape and meaning, and mobilized as part of broader processes of interpretation and meaning-making. We examine these processes through the lens of ethnographic practice and, in particular, ethnography’s attention to narrative processes. We draw on a particular case in which digital data must be animated and narrated by different groups in order to examine broader questions of how we might (...) come to understand data ethnographically. (shrink)

In current Western societies, increasing numbers of people express their desire to choose when to die. Allowing people to choose the moment of their death is an ethical issue that should be embedded in sound clinical and legal frameworks. In the case of persons with dementia, it raises further ethical questions such as: Does the person have the capacity to make the choice? Is the person being coerced? Who should be involved in the decision? Is the person’s suffering untreatable? The (...) use of Advance Euthanasia Directives (AED) is suggested as a way to deal with end-of-life wishes of persons with dementia. However, in the Netherlands—the only country in which this practice is legal—the experiences of patients, doctors, and relatives have been far from satisfactory.Our paper analyses this complex ethical challenge from a Dignity-Enhancing Care approach, starting from the Dutch experiences with AED as a case. We first consider the lived experiences of the different stakeholders, seeking out a dialogical-interpretative understanding of care. We aim to promote human dignity as a normative standard for end-of-life care practices. Three concrete proposals are then presented in which this approach can be operationalised in order to deal respectfully with the end-of-life choices of persons with dementia. (shrink)

Research on the effects of particularistic human resource practices (i.e., favoritism and nepotism) on organizational outcomes has concentrated on direct negative attitudinal and behavioral responses. By integrating legitimacy and social exchange theories, this paper proposes and tests the idea that legitimacy of particularistic practices might moderate their negative effects on employee attitudes at work. Through a survey of 415 employees across multiple organizational types, we show that the legitimacy of particularism mitigates its negative effects on affective commitment and perceived distributive (...) and procedural justice in non-family-owned businesses only. We discuss implications for theory and practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE EDUCATOR IN THE FACE OF REFORM Enrique Gómez León It might be claimed that all the reforms ofthe educational systems of the wealthy nations of the West aim to accomplish the motto of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The principle goal of school today is the formation ofcitizens. Laws enshrine this sacred purpose, and politicians repeat it in every conceivable declaration oftheir programs. Public schools are (...) ofcourse part and parcel ofthe State. It is the ideals ofthe State that govern the educational process, and this in a double sense: schools should train pupils in these values, and at the same time reproduce these values in their functional processes. A quick glance at the characteristics of any high school allows us to recognize the values in question: a)Freedom of expression for teachers and pupils; freedom ofprograms, or rather the multiplication of subjects to be taught, since schools should represent every facet of our complex reality; freedom also from etiquette, from formal rules of behavior regarding what to wear, the way to speak up, how to address teachers; freedom, finally, from parents, who abandon to schools the role of primary and fundamental educator. b)Equality, a benefit ofdemocratization, which bears with it the obligation ofschooling for all; boys and girls study the same contents, and there is no exclusion for economic or religious reasons, nor for intellectual ones. c)Fraternity nowadays cashes out as tolerance, a true fetish word in the contemporary world. It is a tolerance which implies an absolute laicity so as to allow the expression ofevery kind ofbelief, or its lack, and which implies the right to speak far beyond what science allows, and yet to fall far short of what it demands, since emotion and sentiment demand their place alongside, or above, truth. The indubitable goodness of these objectives, these ideals—which no one would dare to criticize in public—does not manage to hide a spreading sense ofmalaise: teachers complain that pupils learn less and less, discipline problems increase; adolescents complain that school doesn't frighten them Enrique Gómez León97 any more, it'sjust boring; parents complain that there are no longer any good manners, their children are wasting their time; the newspapers deplore the increase of violence in the schools. Often the motives behind these complaints are quite banal: teachers focus on their own convenience and resist change; comparisons with the past are no longer valuable, since now everybody has become a product of schooling; most adolescents, above all, are extraordinarily entertained by school, where they meet up with their friends; parents forget that they had already scandalized their own parents with their astounding new mores; newspapers are slaves to the moment, obliged every day to forget what happened yesterday. We should not overlook the bad reasons for complaining about the malaise, but we should equally give it its due attention. I would like to bring out some arguments underlying it, as described from the position ofa teacher ofadolescents who loves and enjoys his profession. This malaise does not spring from resistance to the ideals of our era—liberty, equality, fraternity—but from the experience of a surprising fact: the more one exalts that slogan, the more the intellectual task of the school recedes into the background. As a consequence, freedom is reduced to lack of direction, equality to simple indifference, and fraternity to a paralyzing absence ofany meaningful boundaries. School, then—we are still talking about the state education system—may tend to produce what it is trying to avoid: a society both less free and more unequal. It is the apprehension of this future that provokes some disquieting questions among teachers: What use is this? What am I doing? What might I be able to do? In other words: What power do I have? So as to bring out some elements for discussion, and with the goal also of justifying the preceding hypothesis, I am going to approach the problem by first drawing away from it. In this way I hope to gather the necessary "élan" to underline two points—among many others—which, in my opinion, deserve more thought. Mircea Eliade repeats on several occasion this... (shrink)

When men and women cannot attain idealized gendered forms of economic provision and dependence, how do they make sense of this perceived failure? In this article, we posit that poor health narratives serve as a gendered tool to make sense of inadequate livelihoods, even when that inadequacy is attributable to structural conditions. We draw on survey and life-history interview data from middle-aged and older rural South Africans. The survey data show that even after adjusting for biometrically measured health differences, working-age (...) men report poorer health when they are unemployed, and women and pension-age men report poorer health when they live without household earners. Life-history interviews show parallel patterns: When their economic circumstance is not troubled, individuals regularly minimize health concerns; conversely, when they have a troubled livelihood, individuals draw on poor health to explain it. When women and men cannot perform idealized gendered practices in the family, poor health becomes a tool to reduce the resulting cognitive dissonance. Poor health narratives recast perceived gender failures to an individualized, biological explanation. Our study illustrates how the epidemiological context can be a resource that forestalls a redefinition of gender norms when the gender order is in crisis. (shrink)

Respect for human embryos is often defended on the basis of the potentiality argument: embryos deserve respect because they already possess potentially the features that in adults are fully actualized. Opponents of this argument challenge it by claiming that if embryos should be respected because they are potentially adults, then gametes should be respected because they are potentially embryos. This article rejects this reductio ad absurdum argument by showing that there are two different types of potentiality involved so that the (...) transitivity of potentiality does not hold up in this case. Respect for embryos does not logically entail respect for gametes. (shrink)

Experimental studies show that some corvids, apes, and rodents possess a common long-term memory system that allows them to take goal-directed actions on the basis of absent spatiotemporal contexts. In other words, evidence supports the hypothesis that Episodic Memory —far from being uniquely human— has evolved as a cross-species meaning making system. However, within this zoosemiotic breakthrough, neurocognitive studies now struggle characterizing the relations between teleological factors and phenomenological factors that would account for the episodic behavior displayed by these living (...) beings. Within such field, this paper identifies four epistemological gaps —the ‘Nagelian’, ‘de Waalian’, ‘Chomskyan’, and ‘semiotic’ gaps—, making a case for the need of a future biosemiotic model of Alloanimal Episodic Memory to come into the equation. As a whole, I conclude that experimental developments in AEM research, and philosophical advancements in biosemiotics could converge through the concept of semiosis. Introducing the latter would account for animal episodic agency as a causal influence and continuity between the above relations, outclassing the reductionist and Cartesian separation between ‘external’ bodily behavior and ‘internal’ computational operations. (shrink)

The 3-valued paraconsistent logic Ciore was developed by Carnielli, Marcos and de Amo under the name LFI2, in the study of inconsistent databases from the point of view of logics of formal inconsistency (LFIs). They also considered a first-order version of Ciore called LFI2*. The logic Ciore enjoys extreme features concerning propagation and retropropagation of the consistency operator: a formula is consistent if and only if some of its subformulas is consistent. In addition, Ciore is algebraizable in the sense of (...) Blok and Pigozzi. On the other hand, the logic LFI2* satisfies a somewhat counter-intuitive property: the universal and the existential quantifier are inter-definable by means of the paraconsistent negation, as it happens in classical first-order logic with respect to the classical negation. This feature seems to be unnatural, given that both quantifiers have the classical meaning in LFI2*, and that this logic does not satisfy the De Morgan laws with respect to its paraconsistent negation. The first goal of the present article is to introduce a first-order version of Ciore (which we call QCiore) preserving the spirit of Ciore, that is, without introducing unexpected relationships between the quantifiers. The second goal of the article is to adapt to QCiore the partial structures semantics for the first-order paraconsistent logic LPT1 introduced by Coniglio and Silvestrini, which generalizes the semantic notion of quasi-truth considered by Mikeberg, da Costa and Chuaqui. Finally, some important results of classical Model Theory are obtained for this logic, such as Robinson’s joint consistency theorem, amalgamation and interpolation. Although we focus on QCiore, this framework can be adapted to other 3-valued first-order LFIs. (shrink)